Episode 31: Recognizing our Heart Wounds Part 2

We are on part two of heart wounds. Last time, we talked about why our heart does what it does, how it protects us with the walls, what it looks like how we can look at ourselves realistically from the observer point of view to see if we are hindering ourselves from healing because we want to stay stuck, what it looks like for us to be a person that wants healing and not to be stuck, how that shows up in our actions, and what we can do after that.

So today, we're going to continue, and we're going to talk more about our wounds and what we can do about them. So just to give you a reminder, we are kind of going over the book, heart wounds by Tian Dayton, the impact of unresolved trauma and grief on relationships. So this is why we are working on heart wounds, because it does affect our relationships, and it affects ourselves when we don't process grief.

She says in here, if we don't resolve those traumas, so grief and the things that happen to us, we shut down our inner world and function in the outer world, just as we did then with the same defenses we used at the time of the original hurt. So we are responding and our actions are coming from a place from the past that aren't necessarily true for today. Have you had an experience like that before where you're trying to talk to somebody or tell them something, you want to relay an opinion or you want to have a conversation, and that person all of a sudden flies off the handle.

And they freak out and they start saying things like you never wanted this and you whatever their scenario is right? Whatever the conversation is, and all of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, this is not even what we were talking about. And this is not even what I said or I meant. So that is coming from a place of trauma for that person. Or if you've seen that in yourself that you have overreacted and later realized, oh, wait a second.

That's not what that person said. That's not even what their text said. But in that text, I saw this one line in there that said something that triggered my emotion of either not feeling enough or feeling abandonment or neglect, or abuse in some form. And so then we've reacted in a way that wasn't actually true for today. We don't want to do that we want to live in a healthy place not in a traumatized environment from the past. So healing our wounds becomes an option. When we look at it on a conscious level, when we turn it into something that is viewed objectively and not emotionally.

When we do that we can start understanding why we are doing it and what's coming up for us. So we can say, Oh, I have some unhealed wound, we need to remember to be compassionate towards ourselves. We have been through a lot. There is no reason to make ourselves feel less than or unworthy. We can do this we can heal and we are not crazy. I promise you the things you're feeling the things you're doing the way you're acting and reacting.

You are not crazy. You are in trauma. I did so many crazy things. I mean, you know, I cut my husband's ties, right? That's the cover of my book cutting ties. I cut them all, can you believe that I was not in a rational state. I was in a traumatized state. This is normal when you're feeling crazy, like hyper vigilant, I was so hyper vigilant. I was constantly looking around to see if I was safe or not see if he was doing something or not trying to check things trying to notice so that I was not going to get tricked again.

That hyper vigilance was trauma, once I healed those wounds, and I could recognize what this was, what the addiction actually was, how it had nothing to do with me. I started to be able to let down that guard and heal that safety, that wall that thought and was telling me No, in order to stay safe. We have to do that. It was making me crazy. But it was just trauma. As I went to 12 step for partners of addicts, I learned so many things.

I actually did the 12 steps for myself as well. But in this program, it talks about our life is unmanageable, and it talks about that we are powerless, we are powerless over our addiction or we're powerless over our partner's addiction. We don't get to control it and by learning to let go of that, because we try so hard to control and manipulate events, I was trying so hard to make everything right or exactly so or manipulate the situation into how much healing work we were going to do and what his healing work looked like, so that I could control the outcome, which meant, so I could control my own pain. But that actually doesn't work.

She says in her book, "The truth is simply that part of life is pain, that no one can avoid. The assumption beneath is that life should not be painful, we do not want it to be and when it is, we try to disown it because feeling it makes us feel too vulnerable. feeling vulnerable and helpless can lead to anger, frustration, disillusionment, and a host of additional painful feelings, then we try to manage the pain rather than feel it to avoid it rather than allow it to reject and judge it rather than learn from it.

Misguided attempts to manage pain, make pain, a sort of master within the psyche, given an enormous power to make us run from ourselves and hide from our own minds and hearts." Right? Is that not crazy? We have to surrender to it, we honestly do. It is it is going to make us even more crazy if we try to control what's happening around us. And trying to control that we will never have any pain again. I thought that if I could not experience pain any more than I would be okay. If he would never relapse and never do anything to hurt me again, I would be okay. That is not true.

I am in a safe relationship now but every once in a while I'll still have a past trigger or trauma. And think about, oh no, Am I safe? Is he gonna be doing the same thing, he's not doing the same thing. So we have that pain, but we can't live in it, we can't feel like we have to control our environment. If we try to control our pain, we miss out on living, pain is going to happen. We cannot control circumstances around us, we only get to control how we handle something and how we learn and how we grow.

So by letting go and learning how to grieve, how to learn how to let down the walls, the more walls you let down, the more free you actually become. Because now you can kind of ebb and flow with the hard things that happen. You can say okay, well, I may go through hard things later. But you know, that's okay, because I know what to do. That's where you can get you don't have to fear the pain. When we're in these places, a lot of times we choose to isolate, we would rather do this on our own because nobody's going to get it.

Nobody's going to understand, nobody's going to know how to help us. And we kind of feel a little ashamed that we feel this way. But isolation doesn't help us, what we really need is to build a support group, a network of people that understand we need actually attachments to relationships, that feel good, that feel healthy that we can count on. So it's important. And that's what I developed in my 12 step group. And then in my later in my therapy groups that I had, even with just my therapist, I was able to gain a relationship where I could be vulnerable, and I could learn to trust. When you reach out and you share your story.

It allows other people to share theirs as well. And then you find out that you're not the only one and it gives you validation and assurance. And you say, oh, okay, I thought it was just me. And it's not. And there really is something connective about finding others that have gone through hard things as well that are willing to talk about it. So if you don't have a support group, pray about what you need, what kind you need. If you don't know anything in your area.

Start with having a counselor, find a counselor, if you want a mentor, you can talk to me and I can be your mentor, and walk you through what it is and help you see clear what your reality is help you figure that out. But in some way, please reach out you cannot do this alone in a way that will feel satisfying. And that won't feel so lonely. It doesn't have to be lonely. I promise you whatever you're going through. Other people have gone through hard things as well.

You might feel like yours is so terrible. So are plenty of other people's, you might feel it yours isn't even as bad as some and you're overreacting. That's not true. Whatever you are experiencing that isn't good that's causing grief that has trauma is important and is valid. In my therapy sessions.

I began doing parts work. It's integrated family systems is looking inside yourself to see what unhealed wounds you have when you're having a conversation in your own head about something or when somebody in your own head is telling you Oh no, this isn't safe. We can't do this.

Or no way. We're not enough. Forget it. Just give up. We're not good at stuff. Those voices in your head are actually parts of you that have been harmed in some way earlier in your lifetime, that have created a mechanism for safety. They are telling you these things because they want to keep you safe. So they mean well, but you're no longer in harm's way. And so they no longer serve you. So as I was doing parts work, I came up with seven different parts that I had.

Now, some people just have a few, some people have 100, it doesn't matter how many are there, they've all been created at some point in your life, to serve you and to help you. So as I was doing this, when my counselor said to me, okay, look in your mind, and see who's there. We're discussing a topic, and I don't remember how it started, how we started parts work, but we were discussing some sort of topic that was causing me harm or trauma that I was feeling bad about, or, or it was consuming me still.

And so he said, Okay, we'll look around your mind and see if anyone's there. And it's so fascinating, interesting, the way your mind can figure out what's going on. And I would find someone or a thing, sometimes it was just like a ball. And then as I kept asking it questions, we figured out what it was. But he would say to me something like, Okay, see if somebody is there. And I would look around, I'm like, Okay, I see somebody, there's somebody there. And he would say to me, ask that person, if you can talk to it.

And I would ask in my mind, it sounds crazy, but it is so awesome. I loved it so much. Ask them if you can talk to them. And so I would ask and they would say yes. And I would continue with the questions asking them, do you know who I am? Yes, I would ask them how old they are. One of my parts was five and, and one was 16. And one was somebody else and it just certain things, but one of them. I named her the nurturer. And she sat surrounding my heart, cradling it tender, soft kind of rubbing it soothing it like you would a baby and and saying please, can someone just come and love us?

Can someone just love us. And it was like she was kissing my heart like a baby's head, like just so loving and kind. and sweet. So she was trying to figure out how we could be loved. And why can't they love us?

And why can't this happen. And she was the one that was created at some point. I don't remember now, that was helping guard my heart because I was not feeling the love that I needed or the nurturing that I needed. I had one that I called it first I called her the wounded. And she was behind this glass. She was banging on it to get out she wanted to be saved. She sat right in my chest down the center of my chest.

And she kept banging, banging, like led me out. She was stressed and panicked with anxiety. All the other parts of me as as my counselor led me to have all of them talk and share their experiences. None of them liked her. They didn't like that she was always causing problems. And she was always anxious. And she was trying to get out. So he asked me to ask this part if she could just get out because what I noticed was there was this glass in front of her but there was nothing above her nothing behind her. She could have walked out.

So why wasn't she walking out? Right? It was interesting, I thought I don't know. And I didn't like her either. She made me angry. She was always causing me harm and always causing me to feel anxious. And so as we worked with this part, I asked her Well, why don't you just leave? Why don't you just get out then? And she said fine. I will. And she just backed up and fell down into this black hole of nothingness. Well, she did come back.

And as I as I worked on what that was and what the banging on the glass was. I actually saw her in a totally different light. She actually was the lawyer. She was actually me. I was me fighting on this side, trying to fight against addiction and losing my family and learning how to heal.

I was like this fighter. And she was me on the inside. It was as if we were back to back and she was fighting all the insight and all the chaos and all these parts that were causing harm that weren't telling us the truth. She was actually good. She was one of those pieces that was fighting for me and for us as a whole my soul my heart.

So as soon as I figured that out, so much changed, so much of the anxiety went away. All the other pieces in me soften because we were no longer on attack to the warrior person inside me. Right? She is a warrior we want her and everything changed as I worked through each of the parts as I saw who they were and I could tell them, hey, just so you know, we're okay now. The rejected part of me, right? The rejected person in me says just forget it. We can't we can't even do this. It won't even work. It doesn't even matter. It's never enough.

We're never enough. Right? That person needed someone so I could show up in my mind and talk to this rejected person and say, Well, I'm here for you now. What is it that You need to say, and once these parts were heard once I validated those voices in my head telling me, we can't do this, this is never gonna work. God never provides. Nobody ever loves us, all of those. Those things that are lies, they're not true. Once we could heal those real healing took place, I could see the difference, feel the difference. The panic was gone.

I wasn't hyper vigilant about my surroundings, I began to trust and love and let go and surrender of trying to control pain, or outcome, or that I'd ever get hurt again. It feels completely different when we heal our heart wounds. I remember the day you heard me talk about on last week's episode about my counselor asking me to pour the picture of light over the top of my head, this endless light, this endless picture that just kept pouring and pouring this light was beautiful and golden and vivid. And it just poured through my whole body.

And you remember me telling you that as it poured through my whole body, it, it went through my whole body all the way to my toes, except for my heart that went around my heart. Well, I remember the day when all of a sudden, it cracked open, and it started filling into my heart. And then at some point, my heart was full. I could accept love in and I could give love out.

It is important to heal our heart wounds, because we want to feel love from our relationships and our families, when it's given in a way that is safe. We don't want to reject positive good love, as we are healing our wounds. And we're noticing what we need and where we're at. We are capable of feeling even more. If you have felt love before.

Can you imagine the more healing you have how much greater it will be. If you haven't experienced real love before and you know it deep in your soul. I know what it's supposed to be, I just have never felt it. And so I'm unsure if it even exists. It does exist. And every single person is deserving of it. No matter what. It's a matter of working on ourselves and healing our wounds and doing what we need to do. So that we can feel it and find it and give it it's hard to do this work on your own because you do have the voices in your head that are telling you opposite of what is true.

If there's voices telling you that you're not good enough, or you can't do this or you deserve what's happening to you. That is not real. Those are lies. That is not your true authentic self that is deserving of all that is good. It's important to have a trusted therapist or someone that you can talk about these things with that will guide you in the right direction that will see as an observer to what's happening to guide you to see your own reality so that you can see truth so you can separate the harm and trauma from what you need to do, how to do it and who you actually are in the heart wounds book by Tian Dayton that we've been covering this episode and last.

On the back cover of it she talks about some things that you might be experiencing. These are the bullet points "are your relationships regularly marred by patterns of hostility hurt and resentment? When you are hurting emotionally? Do you long for sex or substances such as alcohol, food or drugs? In order to feel better? Do you feel guilty about events over which you had little or no control? When things are going well? Do you fret about when the other shoe will drop instead of enjoying your good fortune?

Are you prone to set an angry outbursts or long bouts of melancholy? When you begin to get close to someone? Do you obsess about being abandoned or sabotage the relationship because you feel smothered? If you answered yes to any of these questions, unresolved trauma and grief from your past may trigger the reoccurring anguish of heart wounds." Our heart wounds are hidden until we uncover them. They happen because of so many different things. loss in some way, death or divorce, addiction or being neglected or abandoned.

There are so many things we suffer because of bullying or self sabotage, or emotional abuse or physical abuse, sexual abuse. Any of those things cause heart wounds. And until they're uncovered, they continue to stay in our system and in our thoughts in our mind. And they kind of dictate the way we live our lives and how we form our relationships. There is so much importance and healing our heart. Our heart is important to us because it's part of us and a part of our love. And the first place that we can start with love is within our own selves.

So as you heal those heart wounds, you're going to find healing in your own soul. At one point, my fear and my resentment was through the roof. My marriage didn't make it. I was divorced a single mom at that point my husband had left my kids without saying goodbye, had gone off the deep end doing things he had never done before acting out an addiction in things that had never happened, and was really away from their lives for between a year and a year and a half.

So during that time of resentment when I was trying to make it and figure things out, I mean, I didn't want to stay with him anymore, because he was not a healthy individual at that time. But that didn't mean I didn't have anger or resentment, that it didn't work. And one day, I was feeling all of these wounds in my heart toward God, and I couldn't believe that this is happening, I couldn't believe that he would let this happen to me. And I just started writing.

And I'm gonna read it to you. It's super vulnerable. And it really shared my feelings at that time. And I had to heal my relationship with God, because I truly believed he could have changed this. And he didn't. And this is what I wrote one day. Why did you let all this happen? Why didn't you save me? I didn't deserve this. You can move mountains, why not? For me? I've tried. I've done all I could, my offering is never enough. The difference is not made up. What did I do that you wanted? Where did I fall short? How can what I did not have been enough.

So you can't make someone change? But why couldn't you make everything okay for me after? I didn't cause it and I went to you and followed you through the whole thing. So why was that not enough to be deserving of peace, sanity and stability? Why do I have to fight so hard for all of that? How have I not done enough to have earned that already? How is this not enough? I've given you everything I have? How am I not enough for you? It doesn't make sense.

How many tears can I cry? How many prayers how many scriptures, attending church, service, counseling, writing? When have I done enough to be given love that doesn't have to be proven, doesn't have to keep being earned? When does the reward come? The safety, the financial security, the family the relationship? When will I be deserving of it working out? I was created for love. I give it and I give it and I don't get it in return. Why? Why don't I deserve real love?

The kind I feel and give to others. What you put down comes back to you right? I can't give love any more than I do. I don't lack in that. Why do you insist on breaking me multiple times for my learning for my growth? How many times break break break? Well, I get up every time. So why do you keep doing it over and over and over? Why do I not get to be happy? Why don't I get the family I fought for worked hard for why am I the one that's alone?

Why did he get the life he wanted? I haven't asked for anything too big or wrong or selfish. He did this yet he has his happiness. Even if it's not with you. He didn't choose you. He still got what he wanted. I can't trust there's never an end that shows it was worth it that it works that it's true. I don't know how to let it all go and be free. The pain inside is devouring me. I can't forgive all this. I don't know how and I don't want to it's not fair. I can't say the words out loud. I don't forgive him. He took everything from me. That was definitely in a place of hurt.

I know you can feel it. I know you can see it. I am sure there are so many of you that get that, that you're mad. How did God let this happen? How did your person do the things he did to you? Or she? It's painful. It's awful. This writing was important for me to write, it was important for me to get those words out so that it wasn't swirling in my soul. It was important for me to see my heart wounds with God and with my ex husband and with myself.

I needed to see all that so I could work on it so I could see it clear. And so I could see all the times God showed up, how he was there teaching me and guiding me and showing me the way every single time. He did not abandon me. He did not take away my life. He actually just helped me through the one that was happening to me. And now I've created something new. I don't feel any of that anymore. I want you to know if you're in the middle of that and you're feeling spiraled. And you're feeling like yeah, I don't know how to get through that.

I was once there. I got through it. And I feel good. And I can read that letter now. Without any emotion attached to it in a painful way. I remember it. I remember feeling that way. I don't forget those things. But it doesn't make my heart race. It doesn't hinder me in any way. It actually adds to what I know. It adds to the truth about heart wounds. how all those voices in my head that were telling me all these things and how unfair this was. How as I healed those wounds, how everything else made sense everything fell into its proper place.

And how I could see happiness and I could see a future and I could see that I was worth it and valued and loved as you do your work and uncover what your heart ones are, as you write it out like this, as you visit a therapist, and you talk this out, so that you can lookas an observer of what your wounds are, you will heal, if you choose to stay stuck, if you choose to stay in that place that says, Yeah, but my situation is different.

Or Yeah, but what you're saying won't work for me, or Yeah, but whatever your counselor is telling you, only works for other people. If you're stuck in that place, you will continue to be stuck until you say, okay, the time is now. I no longer want to feel this way. I no longer want to have all this hate and resentment and anger and pain. I don't want to have anxiety every second of every day.

I don't want to live with this broken heart that says nobody's there. those fears those wounds, that pain and anger is coming from wounds, it's helpful to look at it that way, because then you can actually see it and go, Okay, so I'm not just crazy, because I think about all this, I'm just not always in a bad mood. I've experienced trauma, I have had traumatic things happen to me that have been heartbreaking, and have changed my life. My life isn't ever going to be the same.

I am a changed person, some of the things that were taken from me, because of another person's choices, there is a wound there it is a fact that I will not be the same. But what I have gained because of it is far better, how I know how to be emotionally resilient, how I know how to heal and communicate, and be healthy. And notice when my wounds are coming up, or when it's actually something in the present. I can talk in a calm manner, I can show love and receive love. I don't have walls rejecting love. Everything I went through, helped me. And the reason was is because I chose to get up every day and do the hard painful work.

It's so hard and so worth it. It's life changing. Going to therapy does not mean you're weak. It means you value yourself. It means you know your worth getting healing, that you're worth talking through something that is traumatic that happened to you, and you know that you deserve happiness. And the way to get there is through working on it. Are you going to be brave enough today are you going to choose into choosing you and healing you and loving you wrap your arms around yourself. Give yourself a big hug.

Thank your soul and your body and your heart for helping you get through the trials that you're facing right now. Your soul and heart and body are with you. They want you to heal they want to uncover and show you what wounds you have so that you can be free. As you do that I can promise you that you are going to be happy on the other side. Not without pain and not without bad experiences happening. We can't control any of that but you will be happy and you will be able to not be triggered or in fear of what's ahead. You'll be able to live in peace, work on that work on you choose you every single day. I'm here for you reach out if you need me and I'll see you next time.

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